


After 01x10 (The Twelve-Step Job)

by PseudoLeigha



Series: (More) 2AM Conversations [10]
Category: Leverage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-11
Updated: 2016-04-11
Packaged: 2018-06-01 14:41:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6524317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PseudoLeigha/pseuds/PseudoLeigha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alec and Eliot discuss Parker and trust.</p>
            </blockquote>





	After 01x10 (The Twelve-Step Job)

Alec had no idea what time it was. He and Eliot had gotten the short straw – if you could call it that, when the other alternative was listening to Sophie berate Nate about quitting rehab – and so had spent the whole afternoon and evening babysitting the drugged, touchy-feely version of Parker. It was, if he had to put a word to it, kind of surreal. She was passed out now, sleeping deeper than he ever knew she could, with her head on Eliot’s lap, and her feet in his while Eliot flicked through the two dozen sports channels on his TV (they couldn’t go to Parker’s place, because even he didn’t know where that was, and Eliot probably lived in a bunker somewhere. Alec hadn’t looked into it, because it would be disappointing to him to find out that Eliot lived in a perfectly normal apartment).

“C’mon, man, just _pick something_.” Alec wasn’t a fan of most physical activities, but he didn’t mind watching them. Anything would be an improvement over the constant channel-surfing.

Instead of making a damn choice, Eliot tossed the remote over. Alec barely caught it before it fell on Parker’s legs, and jostled her in the process, but she didn’t seem to care, muttering something nonsensical and shifting slightly in her sleep. He settled on the first movie he found, some chick flick with, he was sure, a ridiculously sappy ending. It wasn’t really his thing, and he half expected Eliot to demand the clicker again and put on something – anything – else, but he was too tired to care. Normal Parker was fun. Parker on happy pills was exhausting.

Apparently Eliot agreed, because he asked a question out of nowhere, something that almost never happened with the taciturn hitter, and it didn’t make much sense. “Did you mean it, earlier?”

“Did I mean what?” Alec answered with a yawn.

“You said earlier, when we picked her up, that it was too bad the pills wear off, because you liked this Parker.”

“Shut up, man,” he tried to deflect. “You gonna wake her up.” If Parker woke up and heard Alec and Eliot talking about her, they were probably both dead, no matter what they were saying.

Eliot laughed humorlessly. “Not a chance. I crushed a couple Benadryl in her hot chocolate. She’s out for the night.”

“Wha – you drugged her? Not cool, man! Not cool.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, did you _want_ to be up all night? You do know she _never_ sleeps, right? She spends her nights like, lurkin’ around and casin’ banks and breakin’ into our apartments, and then does those little cat-naps all day. ‘Sides, the damage was already done. She’s been drugged all week.”

“How did you know – wait, did you say breaking into our apartments? Like the whole team?”

Eliot shrugged. “Yeah. I mean, I guess so. It’s not like I follow her around to y’all’s places. But she’s definitely been at mine.”

“How do you know?” There was no way she’d been caught. She couldn’t sneak up on Eliot, but he couldn’t sneak up on her, either.

“Her shampoo has a very distinctive scent.”

“Riiiight. You just paranoid, man.”

The man in question just rolled his eyes. “Stop avoiding the question. Did you really like bizarro-Parker?”

“Bizarro Parker? Ima tell her you called her that. Girl gonna kill you in you’ sleep,” Alec grinned. “Naw, though, seriously, man? I dunno. The hugs were nice. And she admitted she missed me… us.” The hugs were _more_ than nice. It wasn’t really a secret that Alec had a major crush on the little blonde. Everyone but Parker seemed to know it. She was a damn fine woman, and her childish enthusiasm for thieving or cartoons or pancakes or whatever else she was doing was infectious. The little flashes he’d seen of her past, with the orphans especially, showed him there was a depth to her that they hardly ever saw, beyond the awkwardness and shyness. It was nice to see her acting so relatively normal, instead of getting hung up on her trauma and repressing everything, and he felt all warm and fuzzy inside when she said she missed him.

Eliot was scowling. “She’d hate it.”

“What?”

“Parker. Our Parker. She’d hate this, this… _Rose_. She gets through the day by keeping everything under control. I know once she was in there, she decided to stay, but that was bizarro-Parker talkin’… She hates drugs. I’ve never even seen her drink more than half a beer. It feels like betrayin’ her, likin’ the less-guarded version,” he sighed.

Wait, _what_? Alec had been fully expecting this to be another ‘don’t try to change Parker’ talk, like the one he’d been subjected to that last night in Romania, after the Serbian Orphan Debacle, and it turned out Eliot was worried because _he_ liked this Parker better? “It’s not that bad,” he replied, sudden awkwardness accompanying his understanding.

“It is. She had me put five stitches in her shoulder without even a damn Tylenol because she doesn’t do drugs,” Eliot explained morosely.

Oh, maybe they weren’t on the same page after all. _Wait_ …“Stitches?! When? You…? Why? What? You’re pullin’ my leg,” Alec finally accused, seeing the older man’s smirk.

“Nope. Just forgot you didn’t know about that. The plane job.” He rolled Parker forward and pulled down the back of her collar far enough for Alec to see a new scar, still raised and pink, with little dots on either side where the stitches had been, before laying her back down.

“You insane.” That bore repeating. “ _You_ are _insane_. She’s crazy, and you’re crazy, too. Why didn’t you take her to a goddamn hospital?”

“She didn’t want to go. Jeez, man, it was just a couple stitches, stop freakin’ out. Point is, she hates drugs. Probably grew up with addicts. And she hates not being in control of herself. And she hates bein’… vulnerable. Look, she ever admitted you matter to her before?”

Alec didn’t even have to think about it. That was what had made it special. “No.”

Eliot nodded like he’d made a point. “Carin’ about people… admitting you care about people… that’s a weakness. Exploitable. In my world, and in hers, you don’t want people to know they got another way to hurt you. _She_ didn’t want _us_ to know that. And now we do.”

“So? She trusts us.”

Eliot made a frustrated noise. “No, that’s the point. She _doesn’t_ trust us. She trusts us to do our jobs, but… We don’t know where she lives. We don’t know what she does when she’s not with us. We don’t know her real name, or any of her friends or contacts outside of the team. We don’t know where she grew up, or with who. We don’t know why she does hardly anything of what she does. It’s nice to know that we matter to her, and I like thinkin’ some day she might want us to know that, but right now, she doesn’t, well, the _real_ Parker doesn’t. An’ it feels like betrayin’ her that I do.”

Alec was stunned. He knew the older man was more than just a hired muscle. He did. The man was a fantastic chef, for example, and knew absolutely everything there was to know about any kind of gun, fighting style, or government agency Alec could think of off the top of his head, plus untold depths of trivia. But he hadn’t known that he could do _this_ , this analyzing-people thing. Maybe it made sense. He was a better grifter than Nate, after all, so he had to be able to read people. But this wasn’t just people, it was _Parker_. Even Sophie didn’t really get Parker, and he had to admit, if there was anyone on the team he would have expected to understand her, it wasn’t Eliot. He didn’t know who it was, but… Okay, fine. Maybe he only wished it wasn’t Eliot. The man was a stone-cold badass ex-soldier who beat the shit out of hired goons for a living and slept with a different girl every week. It just wasn’t fair that he should also be capable of empathizing with even the least emotionally available girl Alec had ever met (whom he also happened to be like, at least halfway in love with).

“Maybe we can just… pretend like this never happened?” he suggested weakly.

“Antidepressants don’t cause amnesia, Hardison,” Eliot rolled his eyes, and then sighed. “But yeah, if she doesn’t want to talk about it, that’s probably best. Don’t act like this changes anything.”

“Does it?” he had to ask.

“Nah. Not right now. She’ll probably be embarrassed and not know how to deal with it, so I wouldn’t be surprised if she hides for a few days, but… the longer we know and don’t hurt her with the information, the more we deserve to know, y’know?”

“So you think she’ll trust us eventually?”

“Yeah. Eventually. As long as we don’t fuck it up in the meanwhile,” Eliot said with a crooked smile and stood up, carefully shifting Parker’s head to a sofa pillow. “C’mon, lock the door behind me. I’m gonna get some sleep. You want me to come back in the mornin’?”

“Nah. Nate said it’s only 24 hours, so I bet she’ll be back to normal by the time she wakes up.”

“Alright. Call me if you need me,” Eliot instructed. He slipped out and Alec locked the door before tucking a blanket around the drugged thief and retiring to his own room.

Before that, however, he whispered in her ear, “I missed you, too.” It was probably only a coincidence that a smile ghosted over her sleeping face.


End file.
